(The Times of India,
16 Feb, 2007)
Muffled truths
by Harsh Mander
Five years after some of the most grisly and brutal communal blood-letting in independent India, there is no trace of remorse or accountability on the part of government organisations that engineered the mass violence in Gujarat.
The Narendra Modi government is perpetually in denial mode. It is, therefore, not surprising that a sensitive attempt to portray the fall-out of such hate - Rahul Dholakia's film Parzania - is blocked by threats by the Bajrang Dal while the state government maintains a studied silence.
While the state government routinely abdicates its constitutional responsibilities, in this case protecting freedom of expression, what is worse is the abject surrender of cinema distributors and exhibitors.
Popular Indian cinema tends to steer clear of recording moments of contemporary history that have deeply wounded the collective psyche.
There are remarkably few films on the Partition, Gandhi's assassination, Dalit atrocities, communal riots, the Naxalite rebellion and state suppression, the organised slaughter that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the demolition of the Babri masjid, the upheaval and alienation in the country's north-east and Kashmir and, for that matter, the recent epidemic of farmers' suicides.
Dholakia, a Gujarati, displays moral courage as he recreates India's worst communal holocaust.
The film is a true story of a middle-class Parsi family which lived in the doomed Gulbarg apartments, where MP Ehsan Jaffery was killed.
Many took refuge with this family, believing this was their best chance for survival. In the mob panic that followed, the couple lost their young son.
By retaining the spotlight of the film on the heart-breaking search of the couple for their lost son, the film becomes a testimony of the consequences of hate politics on ordinary people, how it destroys so many innocent lives forever, and how people either crack and collapse out of loss, or cope and overcome with extraordinary courage and strength.
Dholakia's film succeeds in recording the resistance of ordinary people to devastation wrought by hate politics. Five years later, the couple hoped fervently that the film would help locate their child in Gujarat: the mother speaks poignantly of returning to live in Gulbarg apartments when (and not if) their son is restored to them.
The real hero of the film is a child worker, who observes with trepidation and dread the saffron mobilisation and mounting climate of fear.
It is he who ultimately rescues the fugitive family during the carnage. Once again, Dholakia acknowledges through him the numerous acts of compassion of ordinary people, who saved and sheltered hundreds of Muslim families who fled the massacre.
Even one of the rioters saves a woman from rape and slaughter. This again is the unrecorded history of the communal violence in India, which is a saga not just of hate and slaughter, but also of courage and kindness.
All the betrayals are recorded: the police that enables and supports the butchery, and the systematic subversion of justice by courts.
The senior and erudite Gandhian who intellectually rationalises his failure to intervene to prevent the massacre, or to
rescue, heal and rebuild, represents large segments of the senior social leadership of the state, which chose to remain silent as the carnage played out.
Parzania stands head and shoulders above the only other major film based on the events of 2002 in Gujarat - Govind Nihalani's Dev.
A number of independent citizens' reports have established that the Gujarat carnage was planned over a considerable period of time by sangh parivar organisations, with tacit support of the state government.
However, all that Dev depicts is unscrupulous and mani-pulative Muslim politicians fostering disaffection and terrorism, leading to the 'riots'.
The flashpoint for the carnage, according to Dev, is a bomb blast at a Hindu place of worship, akin to the Sabarmati Express incident.
Parzania is more inconvenient. It invests hope not in state justice and collective remorse, but on the resolve of survivors to fight for justice in the courts.
This is remarkably prescient: for the first time, survivors of the 2002 bloodbath are organising themselves for a long
battle for legal justice.
The writer is a human rights activist.